This blog is written by a 20-something living and working in NYC. You'll find lots of content related to social media, television and entertainment, life as a 20-something, rants, and general nonsense. Happy reading!

Monday, May 14, 2012

The 6 Most Annoying Things You Do With Social Media

Let me start off by saying that I love social media: always have, always will. I believe that it’s a powerful marketing tool and an important relationship builder. That being said, there are appropriate ways to use it, inappropriate ways to use it, and tactics that are just plain irritating to those of us following your brand. Let’s take a look at some of our biggest social media faux pas:

1) Linking Your Twitter and Facebook: If you’re engaging on Twitter as often as you should, it’s safe to say that you’re shooting out at least a handful of tweets per day. If your Twitter is linked to Facebook, you’re also shooting out of a handful of status updates. If your fans keep seeing your updates appear in their Facebook news feed, they’re likely going to unlike your page. Unlink your Twitter and Facebook and keep your status updates to a minimum (no more than 2 per day).

Linking your Facebook posts to Twitter isn’t any better. First of all, status updates often go over Twitter’s 140 character limit, meaning your tweets are cut off and you’re tweeting incomplete sentences. In addition, the word “like” means nothing on Twitter, so encouraging your Twitter followers to “like” something doesn’t make sense. When your Twitter followers notice these errors, it just makes it seem like you’re too lazy to think about the most appropriate way to engage with them on each network.

2) Auto DMs: I followed you because I want to hear what you have to say, not what you want to sell me. Auto DMs are extremely impersonal. The worst is when I’m not able to DM you back because you’re not following me: it makes it seems like you’re more interested in talking at me than you are talking tome.

Okay, so this one was particularly funny for me*, but under normal circumstances, this can be extremely irritating. Many of us use social media to get the information most relevant to us in the fastest way possible. If you’re tweeting headlines that don’t closely match what the video/article/picture is about, your followers are going to feel deceived and think that you are an unreliable source of information.

4) Reeeeeallllllly loooooonnnnnnng Facebook posts: In case you weren’t already aware, Facebook users aren’t particularly interested in reading much text. Most hop on Facebook to get a quick overview of what their friends are doing: you should be happy they’re even looking at your brand’s posts. If a post is more than 2-3 sentences, I probably won’t read it and definitely won’t engage with it.

5) #TeamFollowBack: Not going to lie, I was guilty of using this during our staff Twitter competition (I’m not proud of it). If you’re on Twitter enough, you’ve undoubtedly seen this hashtag thrown around a few times. Using #teamfollowback in your tweets may help you get followers, but the spike in followers is short-lived and invaluable. Are you getting the right kind of followers? Probably not. How are these followers going to help your business? They probably won’t.

I love videos as much as the next girl, but adding videos to your content doesn’t automatically make it engaging. Try to keep your video content relevant to your audience and as short as possible (no longer than 2 minutes, tops). Long, repetitive videos can often be irritating (umm… see above) and less engaging to an audience.